Search results for "Metaphor"
showing 10 items of 271 documents
On the Origin of Metaphors
2015
In this article I study the genesis of metaphors from an evolutionary perspective. Analyzing 414 cartoons published after the death of the cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I propose a metaphoric founder effect with the metaphors “PENCIL IS A WEAPON,” “PENCIL IS A CARTOONIST,” and “PENCIL IS FREEDOM,” and a subsequent metaphor drift that creates many related metaphors. Additionally, the success of these metaphors turns the pencil meme into a very efficient and fast-spreading item representing not only the work of cartoonists, but also the fundamental values of Western culture, such as freedom of expression.
Toward the incalculable :a note on Henry James and organic form
2014
In "The Art of Fiction" Henry James writes: "A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts" (EL 54). Written in 1884, the essay addressed Walter Besant, a Victorian critic and novelist who promoted the idea of the novel with a moral purpose. It is quite possible that contemporary readers, preoccupied with James's refutation of the Victorian argu- ment about the didactic imperatives of art, overlooked this sentence. Today, with our knowledge of the writer's notebooks and in the context of the celebrated prefaces he added to the volumes…
Socrate e il mare. Il modello odissiaco nel Fedone
2015
Nel Fedone Platone traccia una biografia intellettuale di Socrate articolata in vari momenti. L’ultimo di essi (τὸν δεύτερον πλοῦν, la “seconda navigazione”) consiste nel passaggio dall’osservazione naturalistica ad una fi- losofia orientata in senso dialogico. La metafora della “seconda navigazione” rimanda al V libro dell’Odissea, in cui Odisseo rinuncia alla vita paradisiaca nell’isola di Calipso per tentare la traversata dell’abisso su una zattera e rag- giungere Itaca. In tutto il dialogo si trovano numerosi riferimenti all’Odissea: l’excursus autobiografico in cui Socrate definisce la propria filosofia può essere confrontato con i Discorsi di Odisseo alla corte del re Alcinoo. In …
Mythical Geographies
2018
This chapter explores the anthropological roots of Lost Paradise, which pivoted the expansion of Western civilization over centuries. tourism has evolved into many forms and practices that escape from water and fire, or the sand, but originally thermals were fertile grounds for the expansion and consolidation of modern tourism. This happens because of two main reasons, civilization whatever its origin symbolizes water as the most important resource for its production and expansion. Secondly, mythologies across cultures and times appeal to an “Eden” where water plays a crucial role as configurator of social order. For that reason, not surprisingly, in making tourism we need from reproaching …
Lexical classes and constructions: an analysis of the constructional realization of entity-specific change-of-state English verbs
2013
This study analyzes a so far neglected part of the constructional behavior of Levin's (1993) entity-specific change-of-state verbs. More specifically, we discuss the integration of verbs from this lexical class into the intransitive-resultative construction. We base our analysis on the Lexical Constructional Model or LCM (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2008, 2011; Mairal and Ruiz de Mendoza 2009; Ruiz de Mendoza 2013). It will be shown that the internal and external constraints postulated by the LCM constitute useful explanatory and analytical tools for the fusion processes between these verbs and the intransitive-resultative construction. We also propose a classification of these verbs on the …
Comprehension of metaphors and idioms in patients with Alzheimer's disease - A longitudinal study
2001
Language in patients with Alzheimer's disease has been extensively studied, with the exception of non-literal language comprehension. However, in our speech, we often make use of expressions, which are not necessarily interpreted on a literal ground. Comprehension of metaphors and idioms was examined in 39 patients with probable early Alzheimer's disease. The results showed that the decline of figurative language is not an early symptom of dementia and can occur independently from the impairment of propositional language. It was also found that metaphors and idioms differ as far as the predominant kind of error is concerned.
A Facilitatory Effect of Perceptual Incongruity on Target-Source Matching in Pictorial Metaphors of Chinese Advertising: EEG Evidence
2020
Using evoked response potentials, we investigated the implicit detection of incongruity during target-source matching in pictorial metaphors of Chinese advertising. Participants saw an image of a product (the target in a visual metaphorical relationship), and then made a same-different judgment in response to a second image (the source in a visual metaphorical relationship) which was (in)congruous to the first image in terms of shape and/or function. We collected behavioral (button-press reaction time and accuracy), and neural (N270, delta and theta band activity) measures. The time-frequency analysis showed faster processing of incongruous visual information. Moreover, shape and conceptual…
Medical Metaphors in Economics News Articles in English and Italian
2017
As Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 3) state in Metaphors We Live by, “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” From a linguistic point of view, metaphors not only exist in everyday language but in specialized discourse too, where they are frequently the result of interdisciplinary borrowings. The language of economics, replete with medical metaphors, is one of the most representative examples of this phenomenon. This paper offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of medical metaphors in English and Italian economics news discourse, as no research seems to have been conducted so far on the topic from a cross-linguistic…
Tra metaforizzazione e simbolizzazione: la metafora come dispositivo linguistico di visualizzazione?
2023
In this paper we will consider metaphor as a phenomenon that lies at the interface between language and imagination. By focusing on how this phenomenon works, we will attempt to shed light on how symbols work. After analyzing the relationship between metaphor and sym bol to highlight the main similarities and differences, we will examine the functions of metaphor with particular reference to the thought of Paul Ricœur. In particular, we will highlight the role that the French thinker attributes to the imagination in constructing the meaning of a metaphor. Finally, after highlighting the relationship between images and words, between the linguistic dimension and the dimension of aisthesis in…
Quali forme di narrazione per eventi come la Shoah? Sulla tropologia di Hayden White.
2023
The critical debate resulting from the rhetorical or linguistic turn brings out within historical research a tension between narrative and documentation that, to the risk of making the boundary between history and the novel implied by the centrality of the role of narrative increasingly evanescent, counterpoints an appeal to the status of evidence, invoked by some historians, which in turn is not without its criticality. In particular, we take as a point of departure Hayden Whyte's Forms of History from Reality to Narrative, in which historiographical research is characterized with reference to the ability to follow those organizing principles peculiar to literary experiments as modes of hi…